iBooks and Safari - Apple's iOS 4 Explored

iBooks

I love my Kindle, but I hardly ever carry it around with me when I’m traveling on business. But I’ve always got my phone. The fact of the matter is that devices like the Kindle 2 or Nook were designed for a different demographic than the iPad or even the iPhone. They were designed for those who wanted more of a book reading experience. If you don’t mind reading on a LCD screen, especially a good one (ahem, iPhone 4), then Apple has your answer.

I like reading books through the iBooks app but the selection is just no where near as broad as what Amazon’s Kindle store has to offer. There’s unfortunately no way to buy books through the Kindle app for the iPad/iPhone, you need to use Safari for that. If Apple can compete with Amazon’s Kindle Store in terms of selection, the iBooks app is getting good enough to be a real competitor to the Kindle.

You can bookmark pages as well as keep bookmarks synced to your iTunes Store account. The iBooks app also doubles as a PDF reader, although flipping pages in image intensive PDFs can be laggy at times (the app itself isn’t particularly snappy to begin with).

PDFs sync through iTunes just like anything else. Simply drag the PDF over to your library in iTunes and it’ll get added to the Books subsection. You can search through PDFs and use the scrubber at the bottom to quickly get to a particular page.

Apple even provides you with a brightness adjustment widget in the iBooks app in case your optimal phone brightness setting differs from your optimal reading brightness setting.

Safari

An updated version of Safari ships with iOS 4 but the updates are fairly minor. Bing is now a search option although Google is still the default (for now).

The search box also autocompletes with suggestions.

The new Safari did crash a couple of times for us during the creation of this article but it’s too early to tell if it’s significantly less stable.

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